The thoughts and ruminations of a university chemistry and roleplaying geek

This hits at an excellent time, as my old game is wrapping up. I started running it two and a half years ago with 3 players. Since then two have graduated and moved away, and we have had several players join, two of which still play with us. The last of the original players has requested a special conclusion for her character, so I’m taking the time to work that into the final adventure(s). I’ve never written an end to a campaign before, and I’ve never worked a players desires into an adventure before. Therefore this year I will end a campaign with a bang, and it will be awsome. For me anyway. This is Call of Cthuhlhu.

However as Alex, one of the graduated players, cannot make it down much, and he is central to the game. Therefore I’ve been starting to look at an alternate game for when he is not here.

I crafted two plans originally and presented them to my players. The first was that I would run Dungeonslayers in a traditional fantasy game. This did not meet with great enthusiasm as two of my players thought the 10 pages of rules was too complex (I pointed out that Call of Cthulhu has 300 or so, but they already know those ones, or at least are familiar with the ones they need and I tell them the rest. We ignore most of them anyway.)

My second proposal was for a dimensional hopping game, similar to (though I didn’t realize it until later) Dr. Who, Reboot, Sliders, Alternity’s Tagents setting and GURPS Infinite Worlds. I have already blogged a bit about this setting, but in my original post I said I would never run it. This game was the more popular of the two, and I have decided to run it, spurred on by my discovery of the BRP Adventures book, which has enough alternate earth adventures to keep my game going for a long time. My idea for the game has advanced somewhat beyond where it is in the posts I’ve put up, with less of an emphasis on being chased, so I don’t have to worry about my players reading this. This setting works very well with the episodic adventures my players enjoy, and allows me to drag and drop any adventure that I can find & convert. Therefore I am going to start a new game this year, with a campaign that I’ve written from scratch, though it will connect publish adventures.

However, I was reading the host’s post in the carnival and very much liked point number 3: Run a related one-shot with Disposable Characters. I decided not to run a related one shot, but just a couple of the adventures that I was going to put into my new campaign, with the pregenerated characters they come with, and just tell the players the rules. I’m hoping that this will get them over there fear of new game systems as well. I may also find a way to let them bring characters they like into the genre hopping game, as one player doesn’t like rolling up new characters, and I think it would be a cool way to introduce new characters. I am not sure how many one-shots I am going to run before starting my game. Everyone had a great time at the last game, and I have a number of these introductory one-shot adventures, so we will see how things go.

Another thing I want to do this year is finish the adventure I am writing. I am almost done: I was about 80% done at the start of the summer, but have done almost no work since then, except for stating up each NPC. I am not going to attempt to get back into writing it until this summer, but if everyone could remind me of it I would be very grateful. I mean, all I have to do is write the final scene and it is ready to go…

And my final resolution: Play more games this year. I stressed myself out a lot less last semester, spent far less hours on work, and far more relaxing than ever before…and got my highest average since entering university, despite one of my classes having the highest workload of any class I’ve taken, and another being the single hardest class I have ever taken. Therefore, I am going to try to play more games and be more social this year, so that I don’t get buried by stress. Here is to gaming increasing my marks!

Finally, I have one very evil resolution: This year I am going to kill a character. I’ve been far to much of a carebear DM, prompted by early experiences where players got mad and fought tooth and nail if I killed even a first level character. Therefore this year I shall kill at least one established character, not a new character, or a character during a one shot, but an established character. Bwahahaha.